Conferences 2016

In the spirit of the tradition forged by the late Andrew Ladis and his colleagues at the University of Georgia, an international congress of Trecento specialists will congregate at Tulane University to share their research formally and informally in New Orleans, LA. This conference features 20-minute discussions of specific art historical problems, issues, and ideas that focus on the arts of Italy during “the long fourteenth century” (late Dugento through early Quattrocento).

The keynote speaker will be Marvin Trachtenberg, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Thanks to the generous support of the Kress Foundation and other benefactors, we will not be charging any registration fees for this conference. Participants will be responsible for securing their own transportation and lodgings. More information, including options for lodgings, will be posted soon on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LadisTrecentoConference/) as well as on a Tulane website. Conference registration can be found at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrew-ladis-trecento-conference-tickets-20459979349. This will be the inaugural Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference and we are very excited! The plan is for the conference to be held every other year, with a new venue and host institution each time. The 2nd conference will be hosted by the University of Houston in Houston, TX, in fall 2018. 

As we prepare to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s  posting of his 95 theses in October 1517, it may be useful to pause for a moment and consider two important questions: first, how were the historical and cultural events of the late fifteenth and very early sixteenth century defining the European world that would soon break apart along sectarian lines, and, second, how did writers, thinkers, and artists later in the century look back at that earlier world and culture. The years immediately preceding 1517 were  richly marked by events/works that were to have a lasting impact on their times. In 1516, for example, the fifteen-year-old Charles von Habsburg was crowned king of Spain, Thomas More published his Utopia, Erasmus his Novum Testamentum and Ariosto his Orlando furioso, and the Venetians established the Ghetto. The previous year, 1515,  the twenty-year-old Francis I was crowned king of France, Thomas Wolsey was named cardinal and then Chancellor of England, Martin Luther began to lecture on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Johannes Reuchlin established the first university chair of Greek in Germany, while across the ocean the Spaniard Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded the city of Havana. How did people later in the sixteenth century and early in the next see these events? How, for example, did Shakespeare see and depict pre-Reformation England in some of his historical plays? How did Montaigne, or Cervantes, or Caravaggio, or Monteverdi see the world before the Reformation?

This interdisciplinary conference seeks, therefore, to take the pulse of European history and culture in two different ways: from our perspective as early twenty-first-century scholars and from the perspective of late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century writers and artists. In so doing, the conferences seeks to cast its eyes on  both the Old World and the New,  Europe as well as in its African and Asian extensions, history as well as the arts, society as well as events.

For further information on the conference, please contact the organizers, Prof. Elizabeth Cohen (ecohen@yorku.ca) and Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler (konrad.eisenbichler@utoronto.ca). For further information on the TRRC, please visit its web site at:http://www.itergateway.org/trrc/

Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, 1840-1918 is an international conference that will consider the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics and visual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The program will take into account significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, such as the Italian wars of independence, the American Civil War, the founding of the Italian nation with Rome as its capital, the rise and decline of progressive reform in Italy and the United States, and Italian and American participation in World War I.  The event will take place on October 6-7, 2016 and is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the American Academy in Rome, and the Centro Studi Americani, Rome with assistance from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, American Embassy in Rome, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Università di Macerata, Purchase College, the State University of New York, and Kenyon College.  A sister conference, “The Course of Empire:  American Fascination with Classical and Renaissance Italy, 1760-1970,” will occur at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC on October 20-21, 2017. More information.

Early modern Rome was contradictory and complex; its vernacular and high culture animated and rich. From Petrarch’s crowning as Poet Laureate on the Capitoline in 1341 to the pontificate of Alexander VII Chigi in 1667, this conference aims to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to investigate the city proper as well as the campagna romana through a variety of different approaches and methods.

The resounding response to both previous Early Modern Rome conferences in May 2010 and October 2013—76 papers from 9 different countries and 119 papers from 12 countries, respectively—mirrored the complex mix of the city itself and the changing face of early modern studies. We encourage papers from a range of disciplines—history, art and architectural history, literature, music, dance, religious studies, philosophy, history of medicine or science, diplomacy, gender, or others—to bring together in a single venue those whose research focuses on the city of Rome and the Roman countryside.

As with EMR2, the first two days of the conference will take place in the city at the cultural institutions in and around piazza dell’Orologio, and the last day of the conference will instead be held at the Orsini-Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano. Given that the organizers wish to foster dialogue with other researchers, we encourage the submission of single papers rather than complete sessions. Complete sessions will be accepted, although we reserve the right to reconfigure them on the basis of other proposals.

Organizers: Paolo Alei and Julia L. Hairston

Conference website: conference.eapitaly.it

Conference sponsored by the University of California, Rome with ACCENT and with the collaboration of the Istituto storico italiano per il Medioevo, the Archivio storico Capitolino, the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, and the Orsini-Odescalchi Castle.

The Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies provides a convenient summer venue in North America for scholars in all disciplines to present papers, organize sessions, participate in roundtables, and engage in interdisciplinary discussion. The goal of the symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern worlds. We invite proposals for papers, sessions, and roundtables on all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and early modern studies. Proposals from learned societies and scholarly associations are particularly welcome.

The plenary speakers for this year will be Barbara Newman, of Northwestern University, and Teofilo Ruiz, of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Symposium is held on the beautiful midtown campus of Saint Louis University, hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. On-campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments and a luxurious boutique hotel. Inexpensive dorm meal plans are available.

All sessions take place in state-of-the-art classrooms and auditoriums with complete audiovisual facilities. All sessions, events, meals, and housing are located within easy walking distance of each other. A rich variety of restaurants, bars, and cultural venues are also only a short walk away. During their stay, participants are welcome to utilize the Vatican Film Library as well as the rare book and manuscript collections of the nearby Pius XII Library. Those interested in using the Vatican Film library, should contact Susan L’Engle (lengles@slu.edu) by email or phone at 314-977-3090. Participants may also use the library’s regular collections, which are especially strong in medieval and early modern studies.

“In the modern conception [of political life], state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. Hence, paradoxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires (…) were able to sustain their rule over immensely heterogeneous, and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of time.”–Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

In his landmark book Benedict Anderson described the proprietary relationship to land on the part of the bounded state, a geo-body belonging to the order of modernity, for which the national survey map may stand as an index. He then alluded to the paradoxical ease with which earlier and often geographically disjointed states managed the permeable edges of their territories.

This three-day conference offers a different set of assumptions when it comes to “the older imagining” of empire, before the rise of nationalisms in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the operations employed by early modern states in ongoing efforts to establish or maintain peaceful relations as neighbors while managing the heterogeneous and often mobile populations in the interstices of their rule.

The conference is part of a larger collaborative project examining the geopolitics of borderlands in early modernity (https://binghamton.academia.edu/KarenedisBarzman). Given the current configuration of the scientific committee, our initial focus is on the historically dense contact zone between Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia–provinces in states of vastly different political and religious orders, with footprints in present-day Croatia. The timeline runs from the fifteenth century, when the Venetians and Ottomans formally acquired territory in the region, to the Treaties of Carlowitz (1699) and Passerowitz (1718), which for the first time established seamless borders between the states via printed maps distributed as public affirmations of binding peace accords. (While these treaties also involved the Austrian Hapsburgs, the conference is limited to Ottoman-Venetian relations due to the rich nature of the archival material and practical matters concerning the fieldwork.) The instrumental use of cartography in detante is taken as a watershed and establishes the temporal end point for the conference.

Suggested paper topics include the composition of negotiating teams and protocols of diplomacy in determining borders (from elaborate gift exchange to the authentication of earlier treaties as points of departure or comparison); the practical aspects of work in the field (travel by foot or mule, provisions and lodging, interviews with local populations, communication via translators, land survey and production of sketches and drawings); the material practices used in marking sovereign limits on the ground (building earthen mounds or piles of stone, carving signs on trees, drilling iron rings into live rock); the spatial practices of borderland populations that hindered the maintenance of detante and, from the perspective of the states, the ability to “live well as neighbors” (a rhetorical trope found in both Venetian and Ottoman political discourse).

The conference will combine formal presentations, round-tables, and a one-day field trip using GPS to map the borders that can be reconstructed with archival material and ground markers, featuring the borders negotiated after the Third and Fifth Ottoman-Venetian Wars (the “War of Cyprus,” 1570-73, and “Long War of Candia,” 1645-69) both of which had significant theatres of operation in the borderlands between Dalmatia and Bosnia. The conference findings and relevant archival material will be made available digitally on the web, followed by publication of the conference proceedings.

Sponsors: University of Zadar; Harpur College, Binghamton University; the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Lila Acheson Wallace Special Project Grant, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Scientific Committee: Karen-edis Barzman (Art History, Binghamton University), Palmira Brummett (History, Brown University), Josip Faričić (Geography, University of Zadar), Egidio Ivetic (History, University of Padua), Kristijan Juran (History, University of Zadar), Richard Lee (The Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University), Lena Mirošević (Geography, University of Zadar), Nenad Moačanin (History, University of Zagreb), Maria Pia Pedani (History, University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari), Walter Panciera (History, University of Padua),Tea Perinčić (The Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral, Rijeka), Natalie Rothman (History, University of Toronto), Kornelija Jurin Starčević (History, University of Zagreb), Josip Vrandečić (History, University of Split). For questions please contact the conference organizers at kbarzman@binghamton.edu or jfarici@unizd.hr.